Science Objectives and Requirements

WISPR will likely be our only chance to see the fine scales of the solar corona without the complications induced by the intervening interplanetary dust and will create important science synergies with the Solar Orbiter and Bepi-Colombo missions. The WISPR observations will be critical for the science undertaken by the PSP in-situ instruments. PSP will undergo numerous perihelion passages at different heliocentric distances. For WISPR, these orbital variations imply both a changing FOV, in terms of heliospheric coverage, and varying spatial resolution in the sky plane (Table 1). Within these considerations, we designed the WISPR science investigation to address all three Level-1 (L-1) science objectives of the PSP mission. We derive the science requirements, which in turn drive the instrument design (Sect. 3), by posing specific questions under each of the Level-1 objective. The objectives are discussed in detail in Fox et al. (2014) but we repeat them here for completeness.

WISPR Pub Number 1